An Australian Startup Creates The World's First AI-Powered Business Advisor

From face recognition to virtual personal assistants and robots, AI has seen huge advancements and unprecedented applications in the past few years - thanks to recent significant developments in algorithm-based deep learning.

But while it’s more common to accept that a machine could help you with a mundane task, would you take serious business advice from an AI-powered "consultant"?

If you’re willing to embrace this concept then look no further than BRiN, a Sydney-based company whose founder Dale Beaumont claims it to be the world’s first AI-powered personal business advisor application.

Referring to the mobile application as "she", the site describes BRiN as "smart", "interactive" and holding "the answer to almost every problem faced by small business owners around the world".

Beaumont, who started his career as a business advisor just after finishing school - and has published 16 books on the topic since – says that the idea of BRiN came about during a visit to Vietnam in 2014 where he got chatting to a local shop owner who was struggling to grow his business.

"After returning home I discovered that there are over 500 million small to medium business owners (SMBs) on the planet. And sadly over 50 million businesses (1 in 10) fail each year," he says.

Given the scale of the problem, he realized that conventional thinking and existing methods based on one-to-one coaching, meet-ups or even live events weren’t enough to solve this problem. "That’s when I turned to technology and started building BRiN," explains Beaumont.